(T-Minus 6) A Thankful Ten Days Before Christmas: This Guy (and Sunsets and Stuff)

He actually messaged me last night and asked when I was going to get to the “people” part of my 10 days of Christmas thankfulness. Pish posh! So impatient!

Day -6: I am thankful for this guy

. . . and the fact that, with him, we somehow manage to discover the most fabulous sunsets.

I’m not actually sure where to begin. I’ve been staring at my keyboard, typing, deleting, and retyping. Augh!

I suppose, a few things about this guy:

He loves to cook. He goes through various obsessions, most of which are soup based, and he will go all out in trying to replicate his favorite dishes. This includes Korean soon dubu (soft tofu soup), Italian cioppino (after which he admitted that he forgot what cioppino actually tastes like), and Taiwanese corn soup. Oh, and he likes to grill. Steak, beer can chicken, chicken wings, fish. You name it—he’ll grill it. The fact that he cooks is, according to my mother, a source of great envy for her friends, whose dearest wishes are that their daughters can, like me, find a dude who will cook for them.

He also loves to eat and drink. Who do you think goes with me every time I go to wine tasting? Or have a new restaurant that I want to check out?

He has also fallen in love with photography! On our first date, I lugged around my DSLR, and he ignored it. Now he notices every camera and lens and gets massive camera envy around bigger/better cameras. He also got me a tripod for my birthday, and since I became reacquainted with my Canon AE-1 film camera, he’s run off to have an affair with my Canon Rebel T1i DSLR. He even calls the camera bag his “man purse.”

Finally, he pushes me to be best version of who I can be. It hasn’t been easy for me this past year. Everything that could go wrong, it seemed, did go wrong. But he was here, by my side, through all of it. Pushing and challenging me. And I’m eternally grateful to him for that. He also encourages my hobbies, like photography. And eating.

I could wax on about him for quite some time, and be so sappy that anyone and everyone who has ever followed me on this blog will block me out of existence. So I’ll just stop now.

Thanks, Chris, for being there for me.

[All photos taken by a Canon AE-1; the first two photos of sunsets were taken on PCH, slightly south of Cambria, CA; the third photo was taken in Napa Valley, CA; the fourth photo was taken at the same time as the first three south of Cambria, CA; the last photo is of Chris and my niece, the day after Thanksgiving this year, in the Berkeley Marina. She’s a ridiculously cute three year old who has no qualms about wading straight into the Bay and getting soaked from head to toe.]